#DigitalMythology: The Searing Truth of Context
The primary goals of this ongoing series of research are to quantify - in increasing detail - what the members of the financial services industry (FSI) ecosystem spend on technology (including hardware, software, data and IT human capital) – which is sometimes referred to as (enterprise) total cost of ownership (TCO); develop benchmarks and analytics that help describe the absolute and relative nature of these spending patterns; and then, use the findings to confirm, deny, expand the prevailing [...]
#DigitalFrontier: Guiding Lights for the Analog Galaxy
Before everyone heads off to worship at the Altar of Tryptophan for a few days, I wanted to share some updated analysis: (I promise to keep it as short as possible, but unfortunately no less dense than usual.) In a recent post, #Technical Leverage: Can You Defy Your Scale?, I added Google’s (and Virtu Financial’s) RPE (revenue per employee) analytics to our core assembly of the 51 largest global banks. Given Google’s stand-out RPE of US$ 1.23 million [...]
#TechnicalVirtuosity: The Player is the Special Sauce
Once upon a time, a few clicks back into my youth from now, I fancied myself a fairly decent piano player. That illusion came to an abrupt demise when I met Fred Johnson. On the surface, Fred was as milquetoast-Midwestern as they come. You might have expected hay to fly out of his mouth when he spoke. But, that assessment would have been seriously flawed, as I soon learned. It turns outs that Fred was blessed with perfect [...]
#Technical Leverage: Can You Defy Your Scale?
If you believe the latest bromides, “IT strategy is business strategy”, then the success of any business is predicated on the deployment of technology – which includes the perpetual coordination of hardware, software, data and IT-related personnel (or human capital). Alphacution has applied this hypothesis to the financial services industry (FSI), first by modeling the technology-related spending of 51 of the largest global banks – arguably among the biggest buyers of technology in the FSI ecosystem – and [...]
#DigitalTransformation: (More) Clues to Shifting Financial Services Technology (Part II)
The following is Part 2 in the series “#DigitalTransformation: Clues to Shifting FinTech” published on November 2, 2015. Digital crumbs don’t discriminate. They illuminate everything. True to this, and despite intense focus on cloud-based offerings, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and other managed services solutions, the digital transformation in the financial services industry (FSI) is by no means confined to hardware. Software development in FSI is in the midst of its own revolution, as well. In either case, and by my [...]
#DigitalMantra: The Key to Operational Agility
Clear your mind and repeat after me: “I am a revenue center.” Again: “I am a revenue center.” Again: “I am a revenue center.” Practice this mantra until it influences your perspective on your own work. I actually tried this stunt at the end of a presentation to an audience of data specialists and related personnel at a recent FIMA Canada conference. Though there appeared to be a quiet skepticism at such an unorthodox request from the stage, [...]
#DigitalTransformation: Clues to Shifting Financial Services Technology (Part I)
Digital crumbs are everywhere. Like the fabled trail left behind for others to follow and discover, there are fascinating clues to be harvested from increasingly abundant data. Yes, the fast-streaming and big data versions of these digital crumbs offer untold clues and patterns – but only seen after applying the latest apparatus to the chore. There are also amazing clues to be discovered by picking up one crumb at a time (often by hand) - and then assembling [...]
#TechnologyVolatility (T-VOL)
According to Al Pacino, as Coach Tony D’Amato in the movie, Any Given Sunday, “this is a game of inches - the margin for error is so small - and the inches we need are all around us.” With this in mind, it turns out that measuring technology spending in detail represents some of those so-called inches. Personally, I have found such an analysis to yield really incredible and exciting insights – representing more than just a few [...]
#humanlatency
Though you may have fully gorged yourself on tales of latency over the past few years, I’m here to tell you that that overall story is far from over. Reason being, there is more than one form of latency – and the value (or cost – depending on your perspective) of at least one of the other types of latency will make the first narrative – the super-sexy knocking-on-the-door-of-the-speed-of-light version – seem like the Leda moon orbiting Jupiter. This is [...]
#GlobalTCO
Ever wonder what the global financial services ecosystem spends on technology? I have - obsessively. The size and shifts of this market – and the tapestry of moving parts within it – is extremely valuable intelligence for all players in the FSI ecosystem. Moreover, with the intense focus in recent years on topics like “XaaS”, clouds, solid state memory, Hadoop clusters and so many other symbols of fintech innovation it is abundantly clear that this is the one puzzle [...]
